Parking and traffic associated with a daycare and a youth theater group has gotten the Magnolia United Church of Christ in trouble with the city's Department of Planning and Development (DPD).
The problem was sparked by a March 28 complaint from a close neighbor, according to records at Planning and Development, which issued a violation notice to the church in May.
Since then, the DPD, the church, the Magnolia Cooperative Preschool and the Magnolia Theater School of Drama have gone back and forth about whether the uses are allowed in the single-family zoning around the church.
The church at 3555 W. McGraw St. also held a June meeting among neighbors, the preschool operators and the theater folks to try to sort things out, according to Rev. Cathy Barker, the senior minister at the church.
"A wide variety of people and groups find a welcome and accessible space at the church," she added in prepared statement. "Our congregation is committed to balancing our church's outreach to the greater community with the interests of our own neighborhood here in Magnolia." Indeed, many groups such as the Boy Scouts and an adult daycare operation have used the church for meetings and activities.
But the violation notice came as a surprise to operators of the daycare, according to the organization's chairwoman, Mary Crocker. The preschool has an average enrollment of around 200 each year, and she noted that the preschool has made its home in the church since 1958.
"It's never been raised in the history of the preschool," Crocker said of permits and traffic and parking concerns. "We're hoping we're grandfathered in."
The theater school, on the other hand, has operated in the church for less than a year. And its presence may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, according to former Magnolia News columnist Scott Cummins, who tipped off the News about the issue.
The violation notice for the theater group also came as a surprise, according to Jeannie O'Meara-Polich, founder and artistic director of the nonprofit organization. "As far as I knew, we were in compliance."
But the theater school has also been facing a moving target in its dealings with the DPD. The first DPD argument was that the group was a commercial theater, something that is prohibited in the area's single-family zoning, she said. "But we are not commercial.
"One of the big deals is this: we are allowed if the theater is an incidental accessory to my program," O'Meara-Polich said. "In other words, I'm not cranking out shows to make huge money."
Furthermore, the school holds 54 hours of workshops three times a year for every three hours of performances, O'Meara-Polich has written to the DPD. "The whole rehearsal is a workshop ex-perience," she added in an interview.
That assertion sparked a change in the approach for the DPD, which subsequently charged that the theater group is a vocational school, O'Meara-Polich said. "I was totally perplexed."
Fine-arts schools fall into the vocational-school category, and they aren't allowed in single-family zones, she conceded. But O'Meara-Polich argues that the theater school doesn't match the criteria for that designation because the students are third- to eighth-graders.
As far as O'Meara-Polich is concerned, a fine-arts school is for high-school and college-age students. "We're teaching mostly primary school," she said.
O'Meara-Polich has enlisted the aid of community members and families of the children studying stagecraft at her school. "We took it to a grass-roots level," she said of support letters many have sent to the DPD.
O'Meara-Polich was expecting a response from the DPD before her sum-mer production of "Charlotte's Web" hit the boards for three days in July. That still hasn't happened, she said.
The DPD expects to make a decision about the theater school this August, said spokesman Alan Justad. "The real issue there is, can it be considered incidental to the church?" he said of the school. "Some latitude is allowed in the code for incidental use."
The coop preschool is a different matter. It's been in the church for close to half a century, and daycares are al-lowed in single-family zones, Justad said.
But the preschool has apparently failed to jump through land-use hoops for all those years. "They need to apply for an administrative conditional-use permit," he said. "They've got to mitigate for impacts," Justad said of conditions for such a permit. The impacts in-clude parking and traffic, and the preschool is already addressing the problem by having parents park in a lot next to the church, a preschool staffer said.
That's not all the preschool plans to do, according to preschool chair Crocker. "We're talking about putting cones out," she said of traffic cones that will prevent parents from parking up the neighborhood.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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